In recent years, as a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material to obtain color print, color negative film is mainly used. After shooting with color negative film, the color negative film is developed, thus obtained image is printed to color paper and then color print is obtained. The above described method is widely employed.
This method has an advantage that a high quality of color print is obtained. However, as both development of color negative film and development of color paper need complex processing processes, it takes not less than 20 min. to obtain color print from after shooting with color negative film. Therefore, in rapid processing there exists a big problem.
On the other hand, with respect to a digital camera which is recently very popular, because photographed image information is recorded as digital information it is possible to obtain hard copy (print) in a few minutes by an optimal means. However, with respect to the digital camera generally used with not more than 1,000,000 of picture elements, the quality of the print is not sufficient yet now.
Therefore, development of a system in which digitized image information and color print of high quality are obtained rapidly using silver halide photographic light-sensitive material without any complex processing processes.
The methods to read image information by a scanner rapidly after the development of silver halide photographic light-sensitive material are described in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as JP-A) Nos. 5-100321, 9-121265, 9-146247, 9-230557, 9-281675, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,101,286, 5,113,351, 5,627,016. But these methods are insufficient in stability and rapidity of the process.